Syon Abbey
Syon Abbey once held the distinction of being the wealthiest religious house in England, a fortune counted at the moment the crown chose to shut it down. Inside its walls stood two separate libraries, one built for its monks and one built for its nuns, and both fed a habit of copying and producing religious texts on site. The abbey's own librarian, Thomas Betson, wrote a work called A ryght profytable treatise. When Catherine of Siena's Dialogue of Divine Revelation was translated into English for the community, the translators renamed it The Orchard of Syon. They added a prologue addressed directly to the nuns.
Founded in 1415, this dual monastery housed both men and women of the Bridgettine order. Across its whole existence, though, only abbesses ever led it, never an abbot. It stood for more than a century on the left bank of the River Thames, within the parish of Isleworth, Middlesex. That ground lies near where the Georgian mansion of Syon House now stands, in today's London Borough of Hounslow. Its name came from the Bible, from the "City of David which is Zion." How a community without a single male superior amassed such wealth is one question this story answers. What happened when a king decided that wealth and loyalty could no longer coexist is another.
Sheen Palace stood on the right, or Surrey, bank of the River Thames, directly across from the manor of Isleworth in Middlesex. King Richard II favored Sheen above all his residences, sharing it with his wife, Anne of Bohemia, until she died there of plague in 1394. Grief drove Richard to curse the place and raze the palace to the ground. His reign ended in 1399 when his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, seized the throne as Henry IV.
Henry IV ruled 1399-1413. His reign was shadowed by his role in the death of Richard II in 1400, and of Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York. Seeking to expiate that guilt, he vowed to found three monasteries, a vow he died without completing. His son, Henry V, became king in 1413. He saw an opportunity in rebuilding the derelict Sheen Palace, one that could visibly bind his own House of Lancaster to the Plantagenets' undisputed legitimacy. He folded his father's abandoned vow into the rebuilding, launching one combined building scheme known as The King's Great Work.
Work on this scheme began in the winter of 1413-14, pairing a rebuilt Sheen Palace with three new religious houses. One was a monastery of the Celestine Order, likely established in Isleworth Manor and staffed by French monks. Those monks refused to pray for Henry V after his wars with France, probably including the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, so the king dissolved their house almost as soon as it opened. Its site probably later became the ground to which Syon's community moved in 1431.
A second house, the Carthusian House of Jesus of Bethlehem of Sheen, opened in 1414 as Sheen Priory, built within Sheen Manor just north of the new palace. The third was the Monastery of St Saviour and St Bridget of Syon, an Augustinian house under the Bridgettine rule, later called simply Syon Monastery. Its first site lay almost due west of Sheen Palace, across the river in Twickenham parish.
King Henry V laid the first stone of Syon Abbey himself, on the 22nd of February 1415, with Richard Clifford, Bishop of London, looking on. Nine days later, on the 3rd of March 1415, his founding charter was signed at Westminster. The exact plot has never been pinpointed, though it certainly lay within Twickenham parish. The historian Aungier, writing in 1840, placed it in meadows then owned by the Marquis of Ailsa, once known as Isleworth Park or Twickenham Park.
The charter's numbers described a shape closer to a trapezoid than a square, its longest side running along the riverbank. That river frontage measured 2,820 feet, with a breadth of 980 feet from the northern marker to the water. The boundary running near the field toward Twickenham measured 1,938 feet, with a breadth of 960 feet to the south of that line. The charter that fixed those boundaries also fixed the abbey's formal title, one drawn from a hill far older than Twickenham or Sheen.
The founding charter declared plainly: "We will and decree that it shall be called 'The Monastery of St Saviour and St Bridget of Syon, of the Order of St Augustine' through all successive ages." The original Latin used the word Monasterium. By 1431, the Abbess and Convent's own petition cited a slightly different version: "The Monastery of St Saviour and the Saints Mary the Virgin and Bridget of Syon of the Order of St Augustine and of St Saviour." Agnes Jordan, Syon's last abbess before the Reformation, was remembered on her funerary brass simply as "Sometyme abbesse of the monasterye of Syon."
Around 1000 BC, King David captured Mount Zion, the citadel of Jerusalem, from the Jebusites. The Second Book of Samuel records the moment: "David took the stronghold of Zion: the same is the city of David." David made it the capital of his kingdom, and his son Solomon later built the Temple there, the dwelling place of God.
Psalm 87 declares, "The Lord loveth the gates of Zion," and the prophet Joel has God saying, "I am the Lord your God dwelling in Zion my holy mountain." Roman legions destroyed the Jewish Temple in the year 70. After the rise of Islam from 622, and the Muslim capture of the Holy Land in 636, Muslims built their own shrine on the mount, the Dome of the Rock, which still stands today. Christian Crusaders retook Jerusalem in 1099, and the Knights Templar built a round church near the old Temple site. A Muslim recapture a century later left the site closed to formal Jewish or Christian prayer ever since.
This same holy mountain lent its name to a rule of religious life that Syon's founders adopted wholesale, one built around a Swedish visionary named Bridget.
St Bridget of Sweden reported seeing the Risen Christ, his wounds displayed, an experience central to the order later named for her. Her rule, a modified branch of the Rule of St Augustine, emphasized devotion to the Passion of Christ and honour of the Virgin Mary. Henry Lord FitzHugh first brought the Bridgettines to England from their mother house at Vadstena Abbey in Sweden. It was FitzHugh who suggested to Henry V that the order should receive one of his three planned monasteries.
Abbess Gerdeka Hartlevsdotter, head of Vadstena Abbey, sent four nuns from Sweden to establish the English community: Anna Karlsdotter, Christina Finwitsdotter, Christina Esbjörnsdotter, and Anna Esbjörnsdotter.
Henry V's original foundation specified a fixed complement of 85 people, following Bridget's own rule. Sixty were women: one abbess and 59 nuns. Twenty-five were men: one confessor general, 12 priests, 4 deacons, and 8 lay brethren. The rule required the sexes to dwell in separate habitations, the abbess and her sisters within their own court, the confessor and brothers within a separate court, both inside the same monastery. The Abbess and Convent formed a single legal entity that transacted business under one shared corporate seal, and the Abbess held the position of overall presiding officer.
Only eight women ever held the office of abbess across Syon's history. Matilda Newton served first, a titular abbess from 1418-1420. Joan North followed as elected abbess, 1420-1433, then Maud Muston, 1433-1447. Margaret Ashby led from 1448-1456, and Elizabeth Muston for four decades, 1456-1497. Elizabeth Gibbs held the office 1497-1518, Constance Browne briefly 1518-1520, and Agnes Jordan 1520-1539, the abbess who died on the 29th of January 1546.
Thomas Stanley, 2nd Earl of Derby, was buried at Syon, alongside the lawyer Richard Sutton and William Stanley, a veteran of the Battle of Bosworth. None of these arrangements accounted for how quickly the abbey would outgrow its own walls.
Sometime before 1431, King Henry VI granted the Abbess and Convent permission by letters patent to relocate the entire monastery. Henry VI, Henry V's son, favored Syon with a string of grants and confirmations. The new site lay about a mile and a half downstream, within Isleworth parish. The land itself had belonged to the monastery since 1422, the year an act of Parliament separated the manor of Isleworth from the Duchy of Cornwall and handed it to Syon.
Their monastery, the Abbess and Convent explained in their petition, was so small and confined that its numerous residents were "not only incommodiously but dangerously situated." They had chosen a nearby spot within the same lordship of Isleworth, one "more meet, healthful and salubrious for them to inhabit." The danger may have referred to the site's closeness to the river, or to the risk of the two sexes living in too close proximity.
The 1431 grant makes clear that construction was already well underway by the time it was issued. The Abbess and convent, the document states, had "begun and with great cost completed" a more spacious edifice for the habitation of themselves and the religious brethren. That living-quarters building must have been started years earlier to be called complete by 1431.
A separate structure, likely the new church itself, remained unfinished 11 years later, by 1442. That year Henry VI issued further letters patent granting the Abbess and Convent special privileges to transport building materials from the king's warren at Sheen across the river to Isleworth. None of the masons, carpenters, tilers, or their materials were to be taken away against their will. Archaeologists now believe this church stood partly beneath, and to the east of, the present Syon House. A century later, that same riverside community would face demands no letters patent could resolve.
Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534. Many at Syon voiced support for his new supremacy over the English Church, some even persuading recalcitrant monks from other houses to follow. Others refused outright to accept the king's new title.
Richard Reynolds, a Syon monk and doctor of divinity later canonised, drew the king's especial vengeance onto the whole community. Reynolds had arranged a meeting at Syon between Sir Thomas More, the king's chief opponent, and Elizabeth Barton, the mystic known as the Holy Maid of Kent. There, More was fed claimed divine revelations that reinforced his opposition.
Thomas Cromwell, the king's minister overseeing the Dissolution, visited Syon in person to demand acceptance of the king's supremacy. He met an antagonistic reception from a monk at the front-door grate. He left two agents, Thomas Bedyll and a Master Leightone, to extract the required acceptances from the nuns and monks.
Bedyll reported that "the bretherne stand stif in thaire obstinacy as you left thaim." Two monks were sent to the Bishop of London for a course of conversion, while Church of England clerics were brought in to work on two particularly obstinate monks, Whitford and Little. The king himself later sent four more clerics to Syon for the same purpose, again without success.
Bedyll took Whitford for a walk in the monastery garden, working on him "both with faire wordes and with foule." When persuasion failed, Bedyll turned to blackmail, accusing Whitford of having "used bawdy wordes to diverse ladys" during confession, and threatening him with "the greate shame of the world." Whitford still refused, described as having "a brasyn forehead which shameth at no thing." He and Little were also accused of denouncing the king's supremacy while hearing confessions through a wall, prompting a proposal to brick up the confessional grille.
Gathered in Syon's chapter house before the Bishop of London and their own confessor, the nuns proved easier to win over than the monks. Told that anyone accepting the king's title should stay seated and anyone opposed should leave, every nun remained in her seat. Afterward they wrote to Cromwell asking him to "be a good maister unto thaim and to thaire house." One nun, Agnes Smythe, described as "a sturdy dame and a wylful," still tried to stop her sisters from surrendering the convent's official seal.
Katherine Palmer and Elizabeth Sander were among the nuns who kept Syon's community together in exile, refusing to disband when they fled to the Netherlands. Both would return to England on occasional missions.
Queen Mary I's accession in 1553 brought the community briefly home. Cardinal Pole issued a charter on the 1st of March 1557 re-establishing the abbey, and on the 31st of July 1557 Katherine Palmer was elected abbess with the queen's support. The original buildings, it turned out, had survived intact through the interval.
Queen Elizabeth I's accession in 1558 undid the reprieve. The Religious Houses Act of that year dissolved Syon again, and its nuns obtained royal licence to leave England entirely. After enduring troubles across France and Spain, they settled in Lisbon, Portugal, arriving there in 1594.
While in Lisbon, the nuns produced an illuminated petition addressed to the King of Spain and his daughter, asking for help returning to England. Known today as the Arundel Manuscript, it is now held at Arundel Castle.
The Lisbon community finally returned to England in 1861, settling first at Spetisbury in Dorset. They moved to Chudleigh in Devon in 1887, into a building known as Chudleigh Abbey, then on to Marley House in Rattery, South Brent, Devon, in 1925 or 1935. Of all England's dissolved religious houses, Syon's alone survived the Reformation as an unbroken community.
The Duke of Northumberland, owner of Syon House, later returned a large piece of sculptured stonework from the old monastery to the community as a ceremonial gift. In 2004 the sisters deposited their remaining medieval books with the University of Exeter Library for safekeeping. By 2011 the community, reduced to three elderly sisters, closed and sold Syon Abbey for the final time. The surviving sisters now live in Plymouth. Long before that final closure, though, the ground the nuns first fled had already taken on an entirely different life.
On the 14th of February 1547, the coffin of King Henry VIII lay overnight at Syon, on its way from Westminster to burial at St George's Chapel, Windsor. Twelve years earlier, in 1535, the Franciscan friar William Peyto had preached before the king at Greenwich Palace that "God's judgements were ready to fall upon his head" and that dogs would lick his blood, as they had done to Ahab. That night at Syon, according to report, "corrupted matter of a bloody colour" fell from the coffin to the floor, apparently fulfilling the friar's prophecy.
Katherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife, had also lived at Syon, from November 1541 until February 1542, when she was executed.
Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector to the young King Edward VI, took possession of the estate after the dissolution. He began building the first Syon House in the Italian Renaissance style, apparently incorporating the west end of the old monastery church. Somerset's execution for treason in 1552 saw the property confiscated by the Crown under Queen Mary, who briefly restored the religious community there from 1557-1558.
Queen Elizabeth I granted a lease of the manor in 1594 to Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, on his marriage to Dorothy Devereux, daughter of Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex. King James I later granted Percy the freehold outright, in 1604. Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland, remodelled the house into the square Georgian building seen today, around 1760.
Hugh Percy was born Hugh Smithson and married Lady Elizabeth Seymour, whose grandmother, Lady Elizabeth Percy, had been heiress to the last Percy Earl of Northumberland. Ten years after his marriage, in 1750, Smithson adopted the Percy name in place of his own.
Channel 4's Time Team began excavating the ground east of Syon House in the summer of 2003, broadcasting its findings on the 4th of January 2004. The programme's presenters pointed to medieval masonry in the north wing's foundation wall as possible evidence that the church's west end survived inside the current house. A later sweep of the floor showed the Tudor surface continuing beneath that wall, suggesting the medieval stones were simply reused when the wing was rebuilt in 1820.
Birkbeck, University of London, continued excavating from 2004-2011. They found that Syon's church design resembled the church at Vadstena Abbey more than any contemporary English church. Using that Swedish comparison, Birkbeck's archaeologists proposed a layout for the vanished monastery, including a probable convent garden near the old infirmary. By 2020, researchers had confirmed that an undercroft beneath the mansion's westerly wing, along with two Gothic doorways, still survived from the original abbey. Further remains, including the abbey latrine's vaults, have been found beneath the lawns.
A separate collection of Syon material, deposited by the sisters between 1990 and the community's 2011 closure, now sits at the University of Exeter's Special Collections, holding the archive, manuscripts and printed books that outlasted the abbey's own walls.
Common questions
What was Syon Abbey?
Syon Abbey was a dual monastery of men and women of the Bridgettine Order, though it was governed only by abbesses throughout its existence. It stood on the left bank of the River Thames in the parish of Isleworth, Middlesex, and was the wealthiest religious house in England at the time of the dissolution.
When was Syon Abbey founded?
Syon Abbey was founded in 1415. King Henry V laid the first stone on the 22nd of February 1415, and the founding charter was signed at Westminster on the 3rd of March 1415.
Where was Syon Abbey located?
Syon Abbey stood on the left, or Middlesex, bank of the River Thames in the parish of Isleworth, on or near the site of the present Georgian mansion of Syon House. That site is now in the London Borough of Hounslow.
Why did Henry VIII target Syon Abbey during the Dissolution?
Henry VIII made Syon an object of special vengeance because of the Syon monk Richard Reynolds, who had facilitated a meeting between Sir Thomas More and the mystic Elizabeth Barton that fed More's opposition to the king. Reynolds was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on the 4th of May 1535 for denying the king's supremacy, and the monastery surrendered to the king's commissioners in 1539.
Who were the abbesses of Syon Abbey?
Only eight women ever held the office of abbess at Syon Abbey: Matilda Newton, Joan North, Maud Muston, Margaret Ashby, Elizabeth Muston, Elizabeth Gibbs, Constance Browne, and Agnes Jordan. Agnes Jordan, the last pre-Reformation abbess, served from 1520-1539 and died on the 29th of January 1546.
What happened to Syon Abbey's community after it was dissolved?
After the 1539 dissolution, the expelled community exiled itself to the Netherlands rather than disbanding, and was briefly recalled to Syon during the reign of Queen Mary I in 1553. It was dissolved again under Elizabeth I in 1558 and settled in Lisbon, Portugal by 1594, before finally returning to England in 1861 and closing for good in 2011.
All sources
19 references cited across the entry
- 2BookWhat Nuns ReadDavid Bell — Cistercian Studies — 1995
- 4BookThe Orchard of SyonPhyllis Hodgson — Oxford University Press for Early Text Society
- 6Palmer, Katherine (d. 1576), abbess of SyonPeter Cunich — 2008
- 10BookYoung & damned & fair: the life and tragedy of Catherine Howard at the court of Henry VIIIGareth Russell — William Collins — 2017
- 14NewsContinuing excavationsNorman Hammond — 31 July 2006
- 15Syon Abbey revisited: reconstructing late medieval England's wealthiest nunnery The PastCurrent Archaeology — 2021-12-02